So a few months ago I was asked to add the ability to our web app to allow tiff files to be uploaded. I'm not familiar with all the caveates of images and the Java language but apparently there are a few formats that aren't allowed by default, one of them being TIFF. So I had to find an open source library to facilitate uploading TIFF images. I looked into a few and by far the easiest to use and incorporate into our app was JimiPro. It's one jar file and only one command for most cases. Simple enough. I included the jar and started using the Jimi.getImage method and got everything working just the way we needed.
Six months later.... Web Ops tells my boss they are noticing something very strange, the servers crash every few weeks because too many threads are running. So being the go to guy for all the strange issues I started looking into this. Luckily a thread dump gave us a starting point somewhere in the Jimi library. So I dove in and found that the getImage call in one of the three places I used it was creating a waiting thread that never got notified. With some direction from my boss I started looking into why only one of the three didn't work. Turns out when you use getImage you need to force it to recognize all the pixels were loaded and that it should stop. One easy way to do that is to create an ImageIcon and call getImage on it. So adding one simple line 'new ImageIcon(image).getImage()' solved my problem and got the waiting thread to stop waiting.
Gotta love those handy undocumented 'features' that cause your whole system to crash!
